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About the FactMiners Game Developer Community

Hello, and welcome to the FactMiners Developers' Community website. There is not much here, yet, beyond what we are bringing over from The Softalk Apple Project website.

The STAP project is creating an Open Culture digital archive of Softalk magazine. The FactMiners game community was envisioned and being realized as a 'pay it forward' tribute to this great magazine that helped shape so many lives during the early days of the microcomputer revolution (1980-84).

FactMiners was founded in 2013 by Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky. As hosts of the FactMiners Developers community, Jim leads the technical design and development activities while Timlynn handles operations and project administration details.

Once fully realized, the "FactMiners ecosystem" will consist of:

FactMiners Players – young and old, thinker-players all, they connect to each other and Fact Cloud host museums and archives by way of the multi-platform FactMiners social-game app

FactMiners.com – the web service providing gamification, player community, and repository workflow infrastructure

FactMiners.org – (this site) the Open Source developer community (here) where we will create and evolve the FactMiners game app, server-based web services, and repository APIs, etc.

Our goal is to create a crowdsource-powered social gaming community that "comes to play" in museum and archive on-line repositories with the intensity of the multitudes who play Candy Crush or Words With Friends. And by playing FactMiners, this rabid game-playing community will produce two results:

Players will spend time exploratory-learning about whatever is the content of a host collection, and

The host museum or archive will get a Fact Cloud data repository [1] that will become increasingly valuable as an educational and research resource.

In short, both the means – FactMiner exploratory-learning game-playing – and the ends – the "by-product" generation of the host collection's Fact Cloud – have value in their own right.